A vehicle is an apparatus that transports a user riding therein in a desired direction. A representative example of a vehicle may be an automobile.
A vehicle includes an internal combustion engine vehicle, an external combustion engine vehicle, a gas turbine vehicle, an electric vehicle, etc. according to the type of motor used. The electric vehicle refers to a vehicle with an electric motor and includes a pure electric vehicle, a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV), etc.
Recently, intelligent vehicles have been actively developed for safety or convenience of a driver or a pedestrian. The intelligent vehicle is an advanced vehicle that uses information technology (IT) and is also referred to as a smart vehicle. The intelligent vehicle provides optimal traffic efficiency by introduction of an advanced vehicle system and via association with an intelligent traffic system (ITS).
In addition, research into a sensor mounted in such an intelligent vehicle has been actively conducted. More specifically, a camera, an infrared sensor, radar, a global positioning system (GPS), Lidar, a gyroscope, etc. are used for the intelligent vehicle. Among others, the camera can augment the role of human eyes.
Accordingly, with development of various sensors and electronic apparatuses, a vehicle including a driver assistance function for assisting with driving and improving driving safety and convenience is attracting considerable attention. In particular, there is an increasing interest in automatic parking technologies for automatically parking a vehicle since a driver may have difficulty in parking her or his vehicle.
Among automatic parking technologies, there is a technology to detect a parking lane by using a camera and automatically park a vehicle in a detected parking space within the parking lane. In general, a camera system for finding a parking space, an around view monitoring (AVM) system, which photographs surroundings of a vehicle, or a rear camera may be used.
In addition, there have been proposed technologies for performing image analysis of an image photographed by the camera, grasping characteristics of an object included in the image, and performing an automatic parking function based on the characteristics of an object. However, the image-based automatic parking function has a problem because it will not work in a parking lot that does not have parking lines, since a target parking space is searched for based on parking lines detected from an image.
In addition, since the automatic parking function is provided by directly setting a position of the target parking space in the parking lot through drag and touch or movement key touch interface by a driver, the processing of setting a separate target parking space may cause inconvenience to a driver. Also, there is a high possibility that the parking lot is inefficiently used when the vehicle is parked in the target parking space set by the driver.
Also, the image-based automatic parking function can sense a parking space based on other vehicles, but it has a problem that the driving corridor area or the like is not considered during the processing of sensing a target parking space based on the other vehicles and therefore, sufficient passage space for the other vehicles may be obstructed due to the host vehicle after parking.
Further, when there is no parking space inside the parking lines in a parking lot with parking lines, there may be a safe space outside the parking lines that the vehicle could park in, but there is a problem that the existing automatic parking function cannot detect an allowable parking space outside of the parking lines.